So when I get home Thursday morning beaming, and the first thing I ask each friend is, “Guess what I was doing on Tuesday in Warsaw?”, they turn their palms and eyebrows up - how should anyone answer that in polite company? “The last thing mo-o-o-st people would expect to be doing on holiday, but the most obvious thing for ME!” The sun rises across their faces: ‘What was the demonstration in Warsaw on Tuesday?” Bless them, they know what excites me and they let me tell bits of the story of the confrontation between the Polish miners and the police.
While I’m telling them the story though, I meet a puzzle in my head. My favourite mental snapshot of my lover from that whole holiday is blurred by teargas. What could be remotely aphrodisiac about this picture? Would you get turned on if your dear friend cut a finger in the kitchen?
The context of the snapshot is important. Both of us, our eyes and the eyes of everyone around us, are red and watery. He didn’t cover his face so it’s like he’s got sunburn. My mind strays momentarily to the 1980s report, suppressed in South Africa, about teargas and cancer, what did it say?
But there’s that electric thing when two passions catch the same bus.
What’s cute is his salvaged yellow hardhat, missing the suspension inside but better than nothing for klipgooiers (stone throwers), who have to be careful of ill-aimed friendly fire. Under the helmet the other thing that’s really cute is his smile and the gleam in his eye, and I suppose we’re both smiling because we’re pleased with his aim and kind of pleased with our class.
Around us are all these hard men. Their work has equipped them for this confrontation. They’re hard because their work is hard and dangerous. Some of them look like they’re wearing mascara, but it’s coal dust tattooed into the soft skin that rims their eyes.
The issue is pensions. If parliament agrees to raise the retirement age, many of the miners will pass straight from that hard and dangerous existence into the terminal ward or direct to a coffin.
When they arrived at 9 am that morning they brought pick axe handles and giant firecrackers. Probably no-one uses a pick axe anymore in the mines they work in. These are still pink, some still with the hardware store’s price sticker. Our side has also broken flowerboxes, cobblestone, hard hats and dust masks. A few of our side also have a vodka anaesthetic, prepared through half a day’s wait for an honest answer.
At some points during that long day the demonstration started to resemble an enormous gay picnic spread out on the shady grass on one side of the square. Men doze under the trees (they left Krakow at 4am to arrive at 7am and it’s a hot day), men share little lunches laid out on Solidarity flags, and here and there men pass around a bottle of Vodka.
About half of the handful of women there are journalists tottering on impractical heels, two or three are mine employees, and a couple more like me are ‘alter globalistas’. And then there’s the male alter-globalistas, who might be sort of honorary girls, the miners aren’t sure yet.
Of course such an environment addles some men’s brains, and there’s the normal complement of mild sexist crap. As I wander around with the local socialist paper and three rehearsed sentences (Two Zloty (for the price of the paper) and. I live in South Africa. I am on holiday here (for why I can’t explain about the inside, though I know what its about), I get invited to sit cuddled in a miner’s arm on a flag on the ground, and who knows what other propositions get lost in translation (I have about 10 words of Polish and no translator). Maybe asking for a kiss if they buy my socialist magazine. (My lover, by contrast, gets bribed with vodka for his socialist magazine.)
However there’s also one guy who sits next to me and looks at the magazine, and gets excited when he catches my drift about SA. He points to his neck chain and my bangle. Is he making an inquiry about my marital status? At last I grasp that he means gold – South Africa has mines too. He bobs his head energetically when I understand. Several have heard of Mandela, and one says suspiciously ‘czarny?’ (black) when he hears ‘Poludny Afrika’
The surreal picnic is punctuated constantly and very loudly by giant crackers. Some of the miners spend the morning preparing the police, who stand sweating under their heavy black gear and the deafening bangs at their feet. By the time the miners climb into them in earnest, the cops are lightly toasted and quite skittish.
As the morning drags into noon, the rambling picnic condenses periodically into a smouldering crowd. They frown and shuffle as the officials report that someone is prepared to talk to someone about talking to the miners’ leaders. In South Africa we used to call it ‘Talks about talks’. As the officials stretch their meagre progress the miners’ eyes begin to slide from the podium to the riot cops, four ranks deep between the parliament and the people whose future is to be decided inside. More and more bodies swivel in that direction. For several long minutes everyone bangs the tar with handles, hardhats and placard sticks, at once menacing the cops and mesmerising ourselves. From time to time a miner takes on a particular shield, with much more noise than effect. The leaders appeal for calm before disappearing back into the talks, promising a result in just two more hours.
The third time comes the moment when even I, with my ten clumsy words of Polish, can scent the storm a second ahead of Tomasz’s translation, when the sweating union official breathes helplessly into the microphone, “Kurwa!...”
Kurwa is one of the ten words I know. It’s a very common word in Poland, and nice girls and boys know it’s never to be used in front of mommy and daddy.
The miners are perhaps a little suspicious when the official, who has been telling us all day we’re not here to fight, starts: ‘Of course if we have to fight we’ll fight….” So there’s not much surprise when his opening sentence continues, “..but…” Moments later he realises that the miners can already see what’s going to come out of his mouth and they know they won’t like the taste. “Kurwa.! gentlemen please…” Tomasz translates the full feebly delivered phrase.
There’s some chaotic minutes, filled by a miner trying to speak his disappointment, but the union leaders turn off the mike, then another young miner makes a brief impassioned speech that few can hear but everyone understands, which ends “Koniec, koniec” (The end, its enough).
So now we’re in the middle of this street battle, somewhere between medieval warfare and cattle-herding. Apart from the police with their shields and batons there are three kinds of gas and two water cannon. There’s every kind of stuff flying through the haze. Whenever the supply of heavy stuff is interrupted there’s a strange moment when gravity seems to slow as a flock of placard sticks, flags and other pointlessly light objects float over to the cops. I’m not too sure of the implications of a foreign national getting shopped for assault on the police but I try to be useful by keeping one eye on what the cops are up to – early warning system for those focussed on their aim – and another eye on my sweetie, both for his safety but also because watching him makes my stomach soar and swoop like a cobblestone.
Eventually they withdraw the water cannon and bring it around the side, as backup for the phalanxes of cops who shuffle out nervously to herd the crowd out of the square. When they first come into view they get charged by the bravest – or maybe the most anaethetised - people. They reply with the water cannon and more gas. Around this time Tomasz salvages the hard hat. I would probably get banned forever from Poland if I was caught hurling cobbles at the cops but I’m pretty sure they can’t do much about me digging the things up.
In my head I remark that they don’t climb into us with batons like they used to at home, and they don’t have dogs. They have to painstakingly, back and forth, for more than an hour, herd us into narrow side-streets, where the crowd’s skin crawls under the unblinking gaze of the water cannon and the wall of cops now muttering into the loudspeaker about their right to use live ammo. Tomasz explains later that they’re quite happy to climb into other demonstrators with batons, but against the miners that would have meant hand to hand combat.
Even in the side streets still some miners pelt the cops and later lie and sit in the street to slow the cops down. At one point they’re all chanting “Gestapo!” at the cops. That’s a very special insult in Poland, which was left at the mercy of the Nazis until after Warsaw was flattened.
Near the end, as everyone hangs around just out of range of the cops waiting for something to continue or end decisively, someone points at me and says something to Tomasz. Another miner frowns at him and replies waving his hand. What was that about? Tomasz explains. The one guy says, I want to piss but I can’t because she’s there. The other replies, don’t be ridiculous, I’ve seen her, she’s one of us.
I feel very proud indeed.
The second guy asks Tomasz if we’re anti-globalists, and when he replies yes he asks for a socialist paper.
Right at the end, when it’s clear they’re totally outgunned, the miners march ahead of the police line singing loudly, and keeping the pace a touch slower than the police would like. They sing a nationalist song and they sing a miners song. The volume says the miners won more confidence from the confrontation than the police.
The next day parliament announces underground retirement won’t change, although surface workers will lose the benefit. That same day I head home with this teeny snippet of class struggle fresh in my head, bursting to tell everyone, and till today when I get the picture in mind of Tomasz in the yellow hard hat I feel that powerful fondness creep over me like a sly smile - the same feeling after we washed the gas off our skins and lay together half-naked though there wasn’t time for sex. I turn this mental pebble over in my mind, wondering if I’m twisted for it but enjoying its salty savour all the same. It must be the combined romance, the clash of disparate excitements, the passion for person reinforced by our shared passion for the class struggle…
Some weeks later I read in the New Scientist (the other thing I’m famous for amongst my friends) that a part of the brain involved in arousal is right next door to a part involved in fear. That’s why dangerous situations are a turn on, it says. Oh. So now we know. (Written August 2005)
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